Money matters: why women founders struggle in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Money matters: why women founders struggle in Silicon Valley

theverge.com

3 pointsitsybaev6 comments

Sometimes I wonder if I should hire a token guy to act as a firewall for bargaining purposes. Then when it came time to bid for a project, I'd bid X, and he would bid X+Y as himself, but secretly he'd be working for me. If his (obviously higher) bids were accepted over mine, it would suck, but at least I'd get the business. His only job would be to be the figurehead. I'd be doing all of the magic behind the scenes.

It might be a sobering experiment.

I would love to see more women in "hard" technology startups. There are too few women founders out there (a sad thing), and out of them a lot work on companies that appeal mostly to women. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I would LOVE to see more women building complex tech startups - evening out the picture.

I just can't get why that has become an issue. What's the difference between male & female founders? Is there any discrimination of the female founders or not? If not, so why is it harder for the women to get funding?

Did you actually read the article? Founders aren't being judged in the same way, due to their gender.

You see the same thing in academia: give some professional mathematicians some identical papers, but randomly with male or female names on them, and they'll rate the ones with male names more highly than their peers who are given an identical paper with a female name. Unfortunately, both male and female mathematicians bias their judgement in the same way, so simply having more female mathematicians (or investors) goes less far than one might think.

imho, your example is not very good, because VCs don't give funding preferably to those with male names. According to the article VCs just "can’t see the world from a woman's perspective". Then the question is why VCs don't hire more female experts if they "can’t see the world from a woman's perspective".

Excerpt from the linked article: ------ At one point, the founder was introduced via email to the head of a VC firm and got a reply from one of his associates. “We were given explicit advice that if we were introduced to a venture partner in a certain way and they passed us off to an associate, we were supposed to respond with, ‘Thanks so much. I’d love to talk, but I’m heads down on a product right now and I’m only able to talk to people with decision-making ability,’” she says. She composed a reply saying as much. Before sending, she showed it to five different male friends who were also founders and they thought the tone was fine. But the response she got from the associate at the firm was shocking. “I got a massive slap on the wrist,” she says. “The tone of the response I received was, ‘Don’t get too big for your britches, little girl.’ And it happened a second time as well.” When she showed the reply to the male founders, they were amazed by the brazenness of the email. They had never received anything similar in tone and couldn’t understand why the response was so cold and angry. ------

Another excerpt: ------ Money men look for people who are a younger, better, smarter version of themselves. It's human nature. The typical funder is an old, straight, white male, hence the typical fund-receiver is a young, straight, white, male. ------

There's a hierarchy of (generally unintentional) discrimination. In practice, there's a lot more discrimination when meeting face-to-face than when just confronted with names - but even in controlled conditions like the above math example, there tends to be a massive amount of bias against women in technical fields. And it's not a matter of perspectives.

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